The Naked Chief Blog

Downturns are always interesting times for the analyst industry. I’ve lived through a couple but always as staff. Layoffs always happen, as we have seen with Gartner and Forrester culling 2-3% of their respective global research headcount over the last month. Australia hasn't been immune. Management changes will occur as well as the usual chop and change of resources between companies. Further consolidation is inevitable.  

What makes this recession interesting is that it is the first since 2005 when the last big spike in new analyst firms (like us) popped up on the radar. Times have been pretty good since then. However as a business owner I am glad that we started almost four years ago and not in the last 12-months. 

In my wrap-up I described it as a mix of the television show Thank God You’re Here and what I can only imagine must be the sheer terror of a first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Over the course of two-days I had to pretend to be 2-inches tall, Marlon Brando, Irish, and a Whisperer. Then there were the prone breathing exercises, video taped introductions in front of complete strangers and of course what I was there for, the corporate presentation. I am of course talking about the NIDA corporate performance course that myself, Kris and Sam all participated in last week. But why did we do it?

In 2006 I approached my wife with a proposition that went something like this. “I want to quit my well paying job.” When that met with silence I bravely continued. “I would like to start a company”. Still silence. “And I would like you and the kids to give me four years to screw-up.” While I wasn't entirely sure of what her reaction would be I was pretty confident that  a high level of trust existed in our relationship. But it wasn't as if we had ever sat down and measured it. So for those interested in taking a short self-assessment to find out exactly how trustworthy you are then visit Charles Green's Trust Quotient (Charles co-authored The Trusted Advisor with David Maister and Robert Galford). For those interested in what my wife said, read on...

In February 2005 I stood on the shores of the Persian Gulf and threw a proverbial message in a bottle towards the Iranian shore. Three years and two months later it washed up on a reach of the Potomac River in Sterling, Virginia. In the ensuing days I made a new business associate and rekindled an old friendship.

TechnologyOne is a minnow in the world of ERP yet the brisbane-based software company will this year surpass 100million in revenue for the first time.

CEO Adrian DiMarco believes that growth will come in chunks of 20-25% over the next few years. Where will that growth come from? By unlocking the complacency of large enterprise buyers. DiMarco's take is that incumbent suppliers continue to profit from organisations unprepared to change.